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| Nearly 100 people listened as this important book was launched by the Deputy Director of MSSI, Professor John Wiseman. |
Deputy Director of the Melbourne Sustainable Society
Institute at the University of Melbourne, Professor John Wiseman, launched the
book and in doing so said:
I’d like to begin by
congratulating the editors – Ralph Horne, John Fien, Beau Beza and Anitra
Nelson – as well as all the contributing authors – for producing such a
thoughtful and accessible collection.
In my brief comments
I’d like to note three reasons why I believe this to be such a valuable and
timely publication - and conclude with three questions which came to mind as I
was reading these chapters.
The first significant
contribution made by this book is its role in refreshing and reinvigorating our
understanding of the familiar – for some of us perhaps overly familiar –
concepts of Citizenship and Sustainability.
As the authors rightly
note, adding a sustainability perspective to citizenship debates provides a
timely reminder that in, an age of rapidly escalating climatic and
environmental risks and challenges, all politics is now deeply and profoundly
ecological.
On the other hand the
inclusion of a citizenship perspective also reminds us of the need to ensure
that sustainability and ecological politics are more fully informed by
principles of social and economic justice as well as by greater awareness of
the transformative potential of participatory democracy and collective action.
In grounding their
insights about citizenship and sustainability in the practical realities and
challenges of specific urban geographies, communities and ecologies the editors
usefully arrive at the following central proposition….
‘Urban sustainability
citizenship situates citizens as social change agents with an ethical and
self-interested stake in living sustainability with the rest of the Earth both
with a diversity of other people and in tune with the ecologic systems that
comprise nature….’
The diversity and
transdisciplinarity of the case studies used to explore and illustrate the
potential of ‘urban sustainability citizenship’ is the book’s second great
strength.
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| Prof.John Wiseman - "This is a book chock full of engaging and provocative stories." |
This is a book chock
full of engaging and provocative stories about the potential – and the
limitations – of creative and disruptive experimentation in many fields -
distributed energy; urban agriculture; green housing; collaborative learning;
co-operative work arrangements; participatory public art; interactive
communications and ethical consumption practices and systems.
Indeed as I reflected
on the rich variety of these sustainable citizenship interventions I was struck
by the ongoing importance of collecting and sharing these tangible and
pre-figurative examples of more sustainable, more equitable and more
collaborative ways of life. Experiments, stories and collections such as this
are surely all part of the creative work required to imagine and build
alternatives to Margaret Thatcher’s dystopic neo liberal metropolis of TINA:
‘There Is No Alternative’.
This book is not, I
should hasten to add, a science fiction fantasy of utopian dreamworlds. Indeed
the determination with which the editors have sought to avoid naïve utopianism
and ensure that the reflections of their contributors are firmly grounded in
real cities, real economic structures and real power relations is a third key
strength of this collection.
As Anitra Nelson notes
“our vision of sustainability is far from utopian, indeed quite pragmatic,
illustrating practical everyday dilemmas and solutions to changing urban
socio-political structures and materialities to make our lives and the
environments we collectively build more sustainable.”
As the editors rightly
note the transdisciplinarity of approach and the diversity of grounded examples
also means that this collection is likely to find a very broad readership
including among students, practitioners and policy makers working in urban
design and planning, environmental politics and economics; political ecology
and political economy; sociology and public policy.
So – certainly a
valuable, gap filling book which I’m sure will attract a wide and appreciative
audience.
I’d like to conclude
by posing three further challenges or questions which came to my mind as I was
reading this book.
1. What role can ‘sustainable urban citizenship’
experiments and initiatives play in continuing to ramp up and accelerate the
climate change goals and targets agreed at the Paris Climate summit?
As many of us are only
too aware, positive responses to the surprisingly ambitious global warming
targets agreed in Paris need to be tempered with the reality check provided by
the ongoing rapid rise in global temperatures and the profoundly disturbing
imagery of the bleached and dying Great Barrier Reef.
One genuinely hopeful
outcome of the Paris Climate Summit was however the impressive demonstration of
the potential for cities and other sub national actors to play a far greater
role in driving rapid and equitable de-carbonisation. One key challenge here therefore
is to identify strategies for rapidly scaling up and amplifying sustainable
citizenship interventions of the kind identified in this book.
2. What role can
sustainable urban citizenship experiments play in imagining and creating the
transition to a zero carbon economy which is just and democratic as well as
swift?
One of the most
powerful recent speeches I have heard on the relation between citizenship and
sustainability is Naomi Klein’s 2016 Edward Said lecture, provocatively
entitled ‘Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering In A Warming World.’
Klein draws on Edward
Said’s broader critique of the violence inflicted through the othering and
exile of displaced and excluded people to highlight interconnections between
the causes and consequences of the climate emergency and other global drivers
of social and economic injustice.
“The most important
lesson” she argues “is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a
technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity
and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of
othering needed to sustain them all. The connections and intersections between
them are glaring, and yet so often resistance to them is highly
compartmentalised. The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change,
the climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation. We rarely make
the connection between the guns that take black lives on the streets of US
cities and in police custody and the much larger forces that annihilate so many
black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world.”
“Overcoming these
disconnections – strengthening the threads tying together our various issues
and movements – is, I would argue, the most pressing task of anyone concerned
with social and economic justice…..We need integrated solutions, solutions that
radically bring down emissions, while creating huge numbers of good, unionised
jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been most abused and excluded
under the current extractive economy.” End quote.
The exploration of
integrated solutions, informed by a sharp awareness of the interconnections
between social justice and sustainability is at the heart of the work of all
the writers here.
My third and final
question is this….
How can we continue to
build linkages between researchers, policy makers and activists working on
urban sustainability citizenship issues both across Australia and
internationally, particularly in the Asia Pacific region?
A month or so ago the
Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, Monash University and RMIT were
delighted to co-host a research roundtable with Aromar Revi, Director of the
Indian Institute for Human Settlements.
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| Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Aromar Revi, will be back in Melbourne for the 2017 Ecocity Summit. |
He also highlighted
the implications for urban research priorities of the ongoing shift in the
geo-political ‘centre of gravity’ from North America and northern Europe to the
Asia Pacific region. This in turn led him to draw our attention to the ways in
which urban policy debates in Asia are often informed by a broader range of intellectual
traditions and perspectives than the relatively narrow brand of neo-liberalism
which has become increasingly dominant in the Anglosphere – and of the need for
Australian universities to engage more effectively with urban policy and
practice dialogues in the Asia Pacific region – particularly in India and
China.
Aromar Revi has kindly
agreed to return to Melbourne to continue this discussion at the 2017 Ecocity
Summit which will be held in Melbourne in July next year. This event which MSSI
is delighted to be co-hosting with Western Sydney University, the City of Melbourne and the Victorian Government will be a great opportunity to continue
to explore the potential of creative and disruptive experiments in urban
sustainability citizenship. The call for Summit contributions will go out in
the next few weeks and Brendan (Brendan Gleeson is the MSSI director) and I
would like to encourage everyone here to participate.
My final task here
however is to formally launch Sustainability Citizenship in Cities – and to
wish the project and all who sail with it all the very best! Thankyou.
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